Event tickets are easily taken for granted. After all, they’re a means to an end; the grayscale stepping stone before the vibrant, colorful main event. So it’s easy to look past just how pivotal tickets have been in the evolution of sports, entertainment, and live events as a whole.
Without tickets, live entertainment as we know it wouldn’t exist. Tickets gave event planners much-needed control and freedom over the type of event and experience they were creating. For instance, ticket revenue allows for bigger, better, and more exciting events to take place. Offering different types of tickets at different price points also means a more diverse pool of attendees – and the opportunity to curate unique experiences for various sections of the audience.
Let’s take a short journey through the history of tickets, before considering what the future has in store and how your business can leverage modern technology to get maximum value from its ticket assets.
A brief history of event ticketing
Event ticketing has a longer history than you might think, stretching back to ancient Greece when the first recorded tickets gave people access to theatrical events. The Romans followed suit, with token tickets called “tessera” that gave citizens access to theaters, gladiator fights, and brothels.
Flash forward to the 18th century, and theater houses in the UK started issuing pre-paid tickets that attendees could buy before the show. This made it easier to manage the entry of large crowds, as well as to measure how much each show was bringing in. Around this time, tickets were also stamped with complex symbols that served as rudimentary watermarks, making it more difficult to counterfeit.
Tickets in the modern era
In the 20th century, ticket technology evolved once again, with the introduction of ticket barcodes that could be scanned at entrances for identification purposes. This brought significant improvements in security and made it easier for organizers to track attendance numbers at events like concerts and sporting events.
These tickets were originally only bought at the ticket house or box office; but in the late 1980s, the ticket industry moved towards a distributed commerce model. This meant that attendees could buy tickets from any participating brick-and-mortar locations, such as radio stations, venues, and record stores.
PDF tickets and the digital world
The next key milestone in the evolution of event tickets can be summed up in one word: digital. As society became more comfortable with computers, the internet, and transferring files digitally, tickets increasingly took digital form, primarily in PDF format. This made it a lot easier to buy and manage event tickets, as there wasn’t a single physical item that needed to be bought, picked up, and safeguarded until the show. Rather, attendees could buy their ticket online, have the PDF file sent to their inbox, and then print it out at their convenience.
The digital era marks the introduction of another key technology in the ticketing space: ticket management software. A good ticket management system helped companies deal with the increased complexity of digital tickets: eliminating human error and making it possible to track and validate tickets from acquisition, to use, and beyond.
How mobile changed everything
Once smartphones came along — with many people walking around with a mini computer in their pocket — Box Offices started using Mobile Transfer Ticketing. This is when a new ticket is generated for each transfer of tickets. This was a gamechanger for the ticketing industry, as it eliminated any chance of duplicate ticketing. It also made it possible to securely buy, view, and transfer event tickets from practically anywhere. This mobile revolution also impacted event promoters and venues, as they could sell tickets, track secondary sales, and see who the end users were that entered the venue.
But as with previous developments, the mobile revolution brought new levels of complexity and administrative risk. This is why ticket management software is essential for businesses looking to control, manage, and optimize the utilization and ROI of their event tickets and entertainment assets.
Join the next stage in ticket evolution, with TicketOS
If the past is anything to go by, the future of event ticketing is bright. If you’d like to be a part of the next chapter — with a powerful, configurable, and intuitive ticket management solution that delivers consistent value — look no further than TicketOS.
TicketOS turns ticket transfers into a seamless, one-application solution, with a client services group that takes on all the assistance that end users need. To see TicketOS in action, book a personalized demo today.